"Without asking."
"It was your work."
She tightened the lid on her rinse shell hard enough to crack the dried lime at the rim. "Brineshell appears to confuse observation with permission."
"Often," he said. Then, quieter: "I spoke to Fetch about technique. Others heard."
That should have helped. It did not. Whether he had announced her at market or merely spoken too precisely within earshot of a settlement that treated precision as news, the result was the same. She now existed in Brineshell's public conversation by name.
The afternoon sharpened the breach rather than absorbing it. Every voice that drifted up from the market walkways below the scaffold seemed capable of carrying her back to herself in a stranger's mouth. Shell ash. Flood blue. Repair wash. When Mavrek passed her fresh cloths through the remaining hours, she took them without looking at him. He did not attempt a second explanation.
That eveningshe stayed in the workshop after the other laborers had gone because the walkways felt socially contaminated, full of people who might know the details of her hand from a conversation she had not consented to join. The lamplit interior at least reduced the world to manageable scale. One lamp on the central table. One on the rear hook near the sample boards.
The open side of the workshop showed only slices of walkway now, lantern glow passing like submerged gold through the slats.
She worked the lower edge of the navigation panel by lamplight, rebuilding a damaged wash where the evening color allowed her to judge the depth better than noon glare. Outside, festival hammers rang from the island platform. Somewhere farther off, laughter ran down a walkway and disappeared.
When Mavrek entered carrying the next day's pigment stock, the workshop shrank.
He took in the lamp, the half-finished section, her still on the bench when any reasonable person should have gone to bed, and said nothing. He crossed to the worktable, set down the sealed jars, and began mixing at the grinding slab with the long patient rhythm she now knew too well. Stone against pigment. Oil uncorked. The faint wet scrape of a knife through resin.
After a while he said, "Your brush is too upright."
No preamble. Just the note itself.
Iva stopped with the bristles a hair from the wall. She knew, before she checked, that he was right. Fourteen hours on the scaffold and then the bench had pulled her wrist stiffer than she realized.
"It is not," she said automatically.
"Aye, it is."
She adjusted the angle a fraction flatter and the wash line immediately sat cleaner under the bristles.
Annoying. Useful. Impossible to argue with now that the wall had sided against her.
"You are tired," he said.
"Perceptive."
"Your hand still reads the surface first." He wiped the mixing knife on cloth and came nearer, stopping at a respectable distance. "But when you are rested, the fingers loosen before the brush commits. You let the wall tell on itself. Tonight you are asking it to hurry."
She did not move.
The correction had come first. Practical. Accurate. Which meant the description after it did not sit in the easy category of flattery. He was describing the technique when it was right.
The subject of that description was her hands.
Iva looked down at them because there was nowhere else safe to put her eyes. Ink stains ground permanent into the cuticles. A tiny crescent scar at the thumb web from a shell knife. Long fingers, too narrow for heavy labor. Hands she had always thought of as tools first, evidence second.
"Most men who admire a woman's hands are about to ask her for free labor," she said.
The corner of his mouth moved. "I already have your labor. Dema paid for it."
That nearly got a laugh from her. She strangled it before it became a sound.
He went on, unhelpfully, "What I named was not for purchase."
She had no prepared response for admiration that arrived honest. So she gave him none.